The danger of mythmanaging change
The Myth of the Change Program: We need a launch event, tag line, and all the cascading activities all mapped out and approved.
The Myth of the Burning Platform: Staff will only change in the face of a crisis.
The Myth of Stock Options: Stock options, high salaries, and bonuses are incentives that grease the wheels of change.
The Myth of Fear-Driven Change: The fear of being left behind, the fear of watching others win, the fear of presiding over monumental failure—all are drivers of change, we’re told.
The Myth of Acquisitions: You can buy your way to growth, so it figures that you can buy your way to greatness.
The Myth of Technology-Driven Change: The breakthrough that you’re looking for can be achieved by using technology to leapfrog the competition.
The Myth of Revolution: Big change has to be wrenching, extreme, painful—one big, discontinuous, shattering break.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Totally wrong.
So wrote Jim Collins in 2001. He goes on to say...
Here are the facts of life about these and other change myths. Companies that make the change from good to great have no name for their transformation—and absolutely no program. They neither rant nor rave about a crisis—and they don't manufacture one where none exists. They don't “motivate” people—their people are self-motivated. There’s no evidence of a connection between money and change mastery. And fear doesn't drive change—but it does perpetuate mediocrity. Nor can acquisitions provide a stimulus for greatness: Two mediocrities never make one great company. Technology is certainly important—but it comes into play only after change has already begun. And as for the final myth, dramatic results do not come from dramatic process—not if you want them to last, anyway. A serious revolution, one that feels like a revolution to those going through it, is highly unlikely to bring about a sustainable leap from being good to being great.
The direction of the solution is Collins's flywheel analogy..
Now picture a huge, heavy flywheel. It’s a massive, metal disk mounted horizontally on an axle. It's about 100 feet in diameter, 10 feet thick, and it weighs about 25 tons. That flywheel is your company. Your job is to get that flywheel to move as fast as possible, because momentum—mass times velocity—is what will generate superior economic results over time.
Right now, the flywheel is at a standstill. To get it moving, you make a tremendous effort. You push with all your might, and finally you get the flywheel to inch forward. After two or three days of sustained effort, you get the flywheel to complete one entire turn. You keep pushing, and the flywheel begins to move a bit faster. It takes a lot of work, but at last the flywheel makes a second rotation. You keep pushing steadily. It makes three turns, four turns, five, six. With each turn, it moves faster, and then—at some point, you can’'t say exactly when—you break through. The momentum of the heavy wheel kicks in your favor. It spins faster and faster, with its own weight propelling it. You aren't pushing any harder, but the flywheel is accelerating, its momentum building, its speed increasing.
The detail of the solution:
Soundbite thinking, fast thinking, type 1 thinking, the pressure of the quick win and the seductive assumption that you can isolate your big change from all of the messy stuff which sits outside the boundary of your change project cause us to mismanage change.
Effective change is slow to be seen and it's the result of people quietly applying forensic focus on making choices which move them closer to their goal without causing unmanageable, new problems. In other words of making decisions they can live with, and making them more and more until the flywheel is turning and their people suddenly turn round and realise just how far they've come, and how their work world is a much better place than they could have imagined. I get to help people do this for a living and consider myself the luckiest person in the world.
No myth management here, just great results.